“Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?” (Matthew 7:9). Our Heavenly Father will always give us that which fills and sustains us, fosters long-term peace and prosperity, and ultimately leads towards our salvation and exaltation. He will never give us anything that will bring us lasting harm, despair, or damnation. In other words, He will always give us bread and never give us a stone. Getting us to mix up the bread and stones of life is one of Satan’s oldest and most surefire tricks, going all the way back to the Garden of Eden where he managed to talk Eve into believing that the forbidden fruit was really a delicious piece of bread and not a stone that would surely kill her. Nowhere is this strategy more literally explicit than in the temptation of Jesus Christ after He fasted for forty days in the wilderness. “And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” (Matthew 4:3). What Satan is really trying to do is tempt Jesus to command God to give Him a stone to eat instead of bread. It doesn't actually matter to Satan if we break our teeth trying to eat our bread-looking stone or show it off to our neighbors to make them jealous or simply stack it on the shelf in the pantry next to all of the other glittering stones that we have commanded our Father to give us instead of the bread He has prepared for us. So long as he can get us to cut ourselves off from our daily dose of living bread that allows us to be filled and abide in the love and the presence of our Father, then Satan has succeeded in making us as miserable as himself. We have surely all wished that we could find happiness in wickedness, that we could be saved in our sins rather than from our sins, that we could have our stones and eat them too. It doesn't even necessarily have to be some vice or obviously selfish or rebellious desire for us to seek to command that our stones be made bread. Maybe we are commanding our Father to heal our loved one who is fighting a losing battle with cancer. It is obvious to us that their health and recovery is not a stone but bread, a blessing from Heaven that must be granted if we are ever to believe in a just and merciful God again. Maybe we are waiting to get married or get divorced, to welcome children into our home or to get them to move out, to serve in a particular calling or to be released from a particular calling. If God doesn't give us the bread we are asking for right away, or, as the months go by, seemingly at all, we can nevertheless take courage and hope and determination in the reply that Jesus gave to Satan when he tempted Him to turn stones into bread. “But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4). If we seem to have gone weeks or months without our daily bread, then let us instead live by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Jesus Christ is the Bread of Life and He is the Word. When God answers our prayers and gives us the bread we ask for, He does so because of the grace and power of Christ’s Atonement. And when He withholds from us the bread we ask for, or, as is often the case, a bread-looking stone that we ask for, then He instead sends His Word so that we may endure with patience our present trials through the enabling and sustaining power of Christ's Atonement. Let us stand firm with our Savior Jesus Christ against Satan's lies. It doesn't matter how much butter and honey he slathers on a stone, we can't command it to be bread or stop it from breaking our teeth and sitting in our guts like a rock. If we approach our Heavenly Father and ask with humility and meekness, He will only ever give us bread and things which will be for our good. I know when we are starving even the rocks start to look good, but we can choose to remain hungry and gnaw on stones that will never fill us, or we can ask our Father for bread and keep asking until eventually He gives it to us. Even the hardest, stalest piece of bread is infinitely easier and more satisfying to eat than even the most precious of stones. I hope we can all pray to our Father every day to give us this day our daily bread, to accept with patience when our bread is still baking in the oven, and to give us the wisdom to see through Satan’s most cleverly disguised stones.
